Alternatives
Products that do what I built an opinionated minimalist ePub/pdf online reader does
Hey so I am making my own book reader and wanted to share it with y'all on hackernews and I saw a submission talking about DRM free books[0] so I decided to submit this submission on Hackernews to show what I am upto :-D I prefer minimalism so I have created three different flavors of it depending upon the particular use-cases and I have linked the most minimalist one as the submission. If someone is interested in a Epub/pdf reader, I have recently made one: https://epub.mirror.forum/ After making that, I was also feeling the need of having standard book downloads and…
- 1L1
2017 · libreread.org
- 2IM
Hello. This year I dived into UI/UX area and at the same time I work as a web developer. I sincerely love making good UI. But at my full time job it's not always possible due to different reasons =\ So I've been posting random UI/UX staff on Twitter, then I made a free book that had 50 tips (posted it here as well). I decided to finish this year by collecting everything I learned and here it is: https://akcium.gumroad.com/l/ui-ux-tips. This time it's a paid one. But, you can check ~20 pages of it, just go to…
2021
- 3
- 4HN
I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good…
2015
- 5AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
- 6AU
I blew off a bunch of "serious" side work last month and built a tiny little embeddable editing tool that I've wanted to have for Ars Technica since, well, the beginning of internet time. It lets any random user make edit suggestions for writers/editors to consider and act on. I think it's pretty cool and it's gotten some good use over the last few weeks. Of note, it's uses a single-field signup form. Edit administration is currently email based, so all it needs is an email address to get people going. I'm sure I'm not the only person to ever do this, but I basically just turned it on one…
2011
- 7JA
Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there).<p>The problem: paperback/print always wins over digital and arguably e-ink. Our solution: make reading a unique and asynchronously social experience.<p>I've love to get some beta feedback and…
2012 · hyperink.com
- 8IP
To be specific, the content is generated by a GPT-2 based model. https://amzn.to/2TCc0v2 Let me know if you have any questions :-)
2020
- 9AB
Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Jun 2026 · tryquincy.live
- 10DE
2021 · github.com
- 11IM
2019 · github.com
- 12DF
2015 · devfreebooks.org
- 13IW
Hey HN, I wrote a short book about the fundamental aspects of Clojure. The target audience is programmers with at least minimal experience who want to learn how to express solutions in Clojure (and perhaps in LISP, generally). If the price is a bit too steep for you, send me an email (address in bio), and I'll provide a discount coupon. If you can't afford it all, and believe the material may help you for studying or interview preparations, I can send you a free copy.
2025 · leanpub.com
- 14UU
I'm launching a free UI/UX primer ebook for people who want to start learning about user interface design and user experience development. Thank you to many HN readers who suggested topics a couple weeks ago. Constructive feedback is welcome. https://github.com/sixarm/ui-ux-primer
2023
- 15OS
Hi HN! I've just published my small home dashboard project on Github. Hope you like it too and perhaps find it useful as a reference for similar ideas. Overall I'm very happy with the LilyGo e-ink device and I'll probably add a bunch of other features in the future.
2023 · github.com
- 16IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
- 175A
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a project that I've been working on the last few days that I finally finished last night: https://50books.org This is a simple site designed to track your reading list into 2015. My personal goal is to read 50 books this year, and I wanted to hold myself accountable. Major sites like Goodreads are great, but were too much of a social network for my personal taste; on the other hand, using a text file (which was my 2014 solution) was too difficult to track and share. I built https://50books.org using Sinatra, sqlite3 (via datamapper), and…
2015
- 18AF
https://github.com/inoda/private_journal Built this to use myself, and I'm curious if anybody would be interested in using it. I'm also wondering if anybody has tips to make it more secure (I'm super super new to encryption and whatnot). The security is probably a bit overkill since chances are that nobody cares about what I'm journaling, but it is fun to implement from a code standpoint.
2019
- 19MW
Over the weekend I wrote a small web app that takes an RSS feed for a blog, grabs the feed, cleans up the HTML, strips out small irrelevant images and compiles them into an e-book with chapter anchors. It requires a Google login since it uses the Google Reader "API". As an example, I was going on a long vacation and had recently discovered Paul Buchheit's blog. I used this tool (which was then just a Python script) to create an e-book and I literally read his blog "cover to cover". It's still rough around the edges, but I figured I'd iron those out if at least one other person thinks they…
2011
- 20
- 21IW
Hello! This ebook aims to teach Linux command line tools and Shell Scripting for beginner to intermediate level users. The main focus is towards managing your files and performing text processing tasks. Includes plenty of examples, exercises (200+) and solutions. To celebrate my latest ebook release, you can download PDF/EPUB versions of Computing from the Command Line for FREE till 08-Nov-2022: https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_computing (the web version linked as the post url is always free) All books bundle (all my 13 programming ebooks) is $10 (normal…
2022 · learnbyexample.github.io
- 22AI
This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)". I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book. I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions. It's still early but here are a couple of features: 1. A really solid cross platform epub reader 2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon) 3. Book chat where you can chat with…
2025
- 23IB
I built a minimal opensource CMS, I use it myself for my blog and for other SaaS. l love blogging, and sometimes I post random thoughts on my blog. The only thing is, I always did it with .md files, which is fine too However, I was excited about the idea of using a CMS that was very minimal and avoiding the option of connecting something like WordPress or other big platforms. Open source (if you want to fork it or contribute) and free to use (unless I see you have a million views haha). Star the repo if you like it!
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 24FO
I've just launched a landing page for an ebook that I hope to have out sometime in June but I feel like that dog in the meme "I have no idea what I'm doing."[1] I am not a designer (or copywriter) but I've been hanging out on HN long enough to have a good idea where to go for help. I used Bootstrap[2] for a template, Colour Lovers[3] for a palette and Weebly's homepage[4] for inspiration. Weebly's homepage is fantastic but as much as I tried to keep it simple and powerful, like Weebly, I kept getting bogged down in massive amounts copy. I think this is probably where I need to most help.…
2012
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →